Winter Sports - Football
T
his is the third and final part of this season’s maintenance at Shrewsbury Town and I pick up near the beginning of February, after the team had played
Southend United in Football League One on Tuesday 2nd. The following day, we carried out some repairs and then brushed the pitch aggressively with the brush cassettes in the Dennis G860s. This was followed with an oversow of 200kg of MM60 and MM75R (five bags of each) the seed put down with a dimple seeder, and another deep spike with the Wiedenmann. Up until recently, the weather had been
wet; well, very wet, but reasonably mild, with some growth and recovery. Now, with nearly a three week break, and newly planted grass seed, the temperatures decided to drop and we covered the pitch
with frost covers to try to keep some warmth in the ground. Unfortunately, the next storm was just around the corner and we came in to find the covers rolled up like giant sausage rolls, with pegs and stanks literally littered around everywhere. We decided that we didn’t have the means to keep covers flat and in one place, so we unrolled the mess and folded them up neatly on the West side of the ground along the tarmac path. We were now getting frosts most nights
and daytime temperatures certainly weren’t getting much above 5 or 6O
now was hope that some better weather would return. On the 11th, we hosted a Lawn Care
conference at the stadium and it was great to meet so many guys from independent companies and take them for a tour around and onto the playing surface. We had waited
C. All we could do
an extra day to fertilise the pitch and it enabled these guys to watch us apply a feed evenly across the pitch. We put down sixteen 20kg bags of Maxwell Advanced Legion 6:5:10 +6Fe mini granule. A full rate feed, that hopefully would give the grass a boost in advance of the televised FA Cup 5th round tie against Manchester United. We left the pitch alone for the rest of the
week, but the forecasted rain didn’t come and, by the Monday, there was clearly some blackening of the leaf, caused by the iron content in the feed. We watered the pitch during the next
week, but kept all the machinery, and ourselves, off it until Friday 19th. The pitch had now not been cut for two weeks but, given the cold temperatures and no games, it hadn't needed it. Now we gave it a single cylinder cut lengthways to start putting the
PC JUNE/JULY 2016 I 79
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